Very interesting, and since the Intel Atom processor (Z2460 platform)
is X86 based, no or very little need for porting to ARM.

Like aarf said, the race is on, ARM vs X86.
My money is on Intel.

Problem is heat with intel cpus for small devices but larger tablets its no problem... The thing is that ARM cpus use less power than Intel based cpus at the equivelent speed, about 60% or so less. it has been said that if a modern PC's cpu was replaced by 60 ARMs or whatever to get the same speed, then it would use less power but the issue there is inefficiency in the software to use the cpus properly. I dont know if here they where referring to 60 arm cores in one cpu or 60 separate arm cpus but the power efficiency thing is the main ARM draw card also no need for sophisticated cooling.

@ Lobster
WOW Knoppix was the first live Linux cd I tryed I was also really impressed with BB and the ascii graphics

the bb demo uses the AA library to render graphics and greyscale ASCII art.. the new coloured version of AA is libcaca, most puppies have this, you can play your videos in coloured ascii with mplayer:

mplayer -vo libcaca moviename.mp4

Im mentioning this because this is the kind of thing that the low performance Rasp Pi could be used for. There is a #libcaca on freenode the same irc server the #puppylinux support channel is on, just type /join #libcaca next time your visiting the support channel, the guy who actually made it is logged in and will help you get started.

The Rasp Pi will also be a good base for old school efficient music formats like .mod.. there are still large active communities that make these and 100's of thousands of songs to download mostly all original compositions. Incidently the previously mentioned BB demo uses .mod music as its sou nd track. A commonly used and still maintained .mod creator or "tracker" as they call it is Milkytracker and this is available from the packages.debian.org repos, need very little to get going on other OSes.

Glad you are still with us Sickgut
Raspberry meets Puppy Power
and still awaiting boards
We can certainly Lobby (one of my disgraced uncles incidentally) the
Pi team to make Puppy the shipping Linux for when they go
education mainstream.
First we have to show we are the best dog in show.

Glad you are still with us Sickgut
Raspberry meets Puppy Power
and still awaiting boards
We can certainly Lobby (one of my disgraced uncles incidentally) the
Pi team to make Puppy the shipping Linux for when they go
education mainstream.
First we have to show we are the best dog in show.

Prisoner: Who are you?
Two: The new Number Two.
Prisoner: Who is Number One?
Two: You are Number Six.
Prisoner: I am not a number; I am a free puppy!

Woof woof (as 'Rover' might say)

We can have a Pussy ready to deploy overnight for Rasp Pi if we can get a hold of one, the only uncertainty is performance..

Given the fact the Puppy people will need to compile an entire repo of software for the new platform, it would take a while to make Puppy ARM friendly. As far as educational systems go, we can presume that alot of this will be to do with programming, science, maths... many many many packages indeed, and this whole area isnt puppies strong suit. As far as the Rasp Pi people and curious children are concerned, the major distros that already have their entire catalog of apps all ready to go in their ARM repos are the logical choice for their default OS. Its hard to explain to a child that they need to download devx and their "lolcode" <--- (yes a real programming language) compiler isnt available for Puppy or when they install it and its missing a dependency, they also need to search online for a working lolcode.so.1.44563 file, when all they have to do with other OSes is just type apt-get install lolcode.

Given the fact that the Rasp Pi is an educational tool, the Puppy that you would like to show off needs to have as much of the obscure programming languages and other educational things included as possible. Puppy by its very nature is good when it already has the app you want in the OS, its installing rare or not very popular apps that the Puppy devs have not added to their repo already that things get tricky. In this case, no newbie is going to know what to do... Puppy is a desktop user community, not an educational OS community... the usual slew of browsers and other apps that mean everything to a desktop user will mean nothing on an educational setup. 100s of obscure packages that most people have not even heard of will have to be added to the Puppy repos and having a practical mindset will not help. It doesnt matter if programming language A is currently maintained and in use, while B is not in use and is obscure... if its educational even for just the historical factor then the teacher will want to show the students how leet he was in 1985 when he used B... It will take a while to create a decent repo and its impossible to know exactly what apps will be used until a few months into it all when it gets well known what apps are being run on the rasp... so its a waiting games still till you know what needs to be in the new repo..

The only point im trying to make here is that the Puppy ARM shouldnt follow the same formula as the normal desktop puppy OS, many more apps need to come with the OS, and this will make it bigger in disk size, because you sure as hell dont want to submit a puppy for consideration to replace the default OS that rasp ships with, only to have their devs guys want to try out some obscure package that isnt in the PPM, and they have to install an ubuntu version and hunt for dependencies. This is what advantage the other OSes have over Puppy.

The thing is that ARM cpus use less power than Intel based cpus at the equivelent speed, about 60% or so less.

Not anymore.
Power is power and for any given power consumption, the heat produced
is dependent on wattage and the temperature rise is the same for the same power consumption.
The ARM cpu uses around 1 watt whereas the new Intel CPU uses 0.8 to 1 watt so the temperatures will be the same.

I looked at the newest video on Raspbery site
and the computer screen states that broadcom is
an Opengl 'Vendor' . Opengl was developed and then licensed out
by Silicon Graphics beginning around the late 1980s.

Hardware requirements
XBMC has greater basic hardware requirements than traditional 2D style software applications: it needs a 3D capable GPU graphics hardware controller for all rendering. Powerful 3D GPU chips are common today in most modern computers, and even some set-top boxes and XBMC is designed to otherwise be resource efficient. It runs well on what (by Intel Atom standards) are relatively underpowered OpenGL 1.3 (with GLSL support), OpenGL ES 2.0 or Direct3D (DirectX) 9.0 capable systems that are IA-32/x86, x86-64, ARM, or PowerPC (G4 or later) CPU based.[2]
When software decoding of a Full HD 1080p high-definition video is performed by the system CPU, a dual-core 2 GHz or better CPU is required in order to allow for perfectly smooth playback without dropping frames or giving playback a jerky appearance. XBMC can however offload most of the video decoding process onto GPU graphics hardware controller that supports one of the following types of hardware-accelerated video decoding:[44] Intel's VAAPI, Nvidia's VDPAU, AMD's XvBA, Microsoft's DXVA, Apple's VDADecoder/VideoToolBox, OpenMAX, and Broadcom Crystal HD Enhanced Media Accelerator.[45] By taking advantage of such hardware-accelerated video decoding, XBMC can run well on most inexpensive, low-power systems which contain a modern GPU. However, Intel Core CPUs with integrated-GPU (or APUs) are not properly supported yet.
[edit]Language support
XBMC includes full support for many different languages by default. XBMC's structure is such that if the language is not available, or not up-to-date, it can be made by editing simple strings in an XML-file, which can then be submitted to XBMC's project management and bug tracking system tool for use by others. Currently the existing supported languages are Afrikaans, Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, American English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian.[4][46][47]

The thing is that ARM cpus use less power than Intel based cpus at the equivelent speed, about 60% or so less.

Not anymore.
Power is power and for any given power consumption, the heat produced
is dependent on wattage and the temperature rise is the same for the same power consumption.
The ARM cpu uses around 1 watt whereas the new Intel CPU uses 0.8 to 1 watt so the temperatures will be the same.

The Intel Medfield chip is using 32nm technology. The smaller the transistors and paths in the chip, the faster it runs and the less power it consumes. A proper comparison should be with a ARM chip also created with 32nm spacing._________________http://bkhome.org/news/

True that one should compare both with the same technology, 32nm in this case.
However the point I was trying to make is that 1 watt of power is 1 watt irrespective
so from a battery life point of view it's pretty much the same.

The size/technology of the internal chip will influence the temperature rise of the whole chip
but again I don't imagine it will be more then a few degrees either way
as the thermal gradient will not be that different.

Speed obviously also adds to temperature, so the faster the chip the hotter it gets
as the individual FETS that make up the chip only really dissipate power
on transitions from low to high or vice versa, so the higher the clock frequency
the higher the number of transitions per second thus a higher overall temperature.
CPU designers overcome this (to a certain extent) by dropping the operating
voltage of the core.
So it's not uncommon for the CPU core to run as low as 0.9V and
the I/O pins at 3.3v or even 5V

<snip>"The thing is that ARM cpus use less power than Intel based cpus at the equivelent speed, about 60% or so less" <unsnip>

ARM cannot really be compared to win-tel
CPUs on the basis of processor speed because the ARM CPU is a RISC device. This is a reduced instruction set CPU. RISC processing is what made the old Macs run so much faster. It also drives the CPUs which are often used in "super computers" and has been heavily used by IBM for quite some time...

Sorry for joining this thread right in the middle of a discussion.
I am a teacher (and a lover of Puppy Linux!). I have recently started a programming club in my school (I teach in a High School in the UK).
Here's the blog I am working on, just in case anyone is interested
http://teampython.wordpress.com/

We are learning to program using Python 3. I am also very excited about the Rapsberry Pi coming out and I have spoken to the kids about it. It would be nice to get off Windoze and be running Linux on an RP. It would be great if Puppy works well on the RP!

My main concern is that when the 10,000 units hit the UK, people on the Pi forum seem to think they will sell out in less than an hour, so I might not get one of the first batch

Don''t worry about speed and CPU power.
We are in this adventure together. On the same page. The same hardware. The same Puppy.
Multicore and other goodies will come later.

It might be necessary to revive some of the command line programs.
We had a command line Puppy (forgot name)

Woof2 is developing ARM support.
Bacon will work as soon as we have ARM dev-x
The original remit of Saluki was Puppy remastered.
Some of that impetus might find its way onto a slice of Pi
coming your way soon . . .
I am going to use Sickguts or any Puppy base because I know where it is going (smaller, more efficient, faster etc)
As usual because of our chaotic structure, we will create an order of development and diversity swifter than ever . . .

Also remember Barry is an assembler programmer
Already people are talking of writing assembler OS for the Rpi
- we can share code and ideas

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